Can’t We All Get Along?

Toward the end of a recent post, I pointed the finger of shame at unnamed “Obama advisers” who are reported to have blackballed Sidney Blumenthal from a post on Hillary Clinton’s staff at the State Department.

Here’s a related finger, pointed at someone with a name: Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief and sometime owner of The New Republic. Like Sid, Marty is an old and dear friend of mine. I’ve known him for forty-eight years, a dozen of which I spent toiling for him at TNR. He’s always been a volatile guy, sort a of Jewish Yosemite Sam (Yo! Semite!), and over the years he’s been known to say or write things that, upon reflection, he comes to regret. I hope this (from his blog, The Spine) is one of them:

Apparently, she [Secretary Clinton] is about to appoint Sidney Blumenthal to her staff at State. Here is a person who knows near nothing about foreign policy, and what little he thinks he really knows is all wrong. I’ve had experience with him. He worked at TNR for a few years, never producing anything remotely important. His employment was my responsibility. Please blame me.

Actually, Sid knows quite a lot about foreign policy—Marty’s information on that point is twenty years out of date. But “never produced anything remotely important” at The New Republic? That’s just crazy. What about Sid’s pack-leading, benchmark-setting coverage of the 1984 and 1992 Presidential campaigns? Doesn’t Marty remember “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” about Patrick Caddell’s search for a candidate to challenge Walter Mondale in ’84? (Caddell’s first choice was Joe Biden.) Or “The Big Chill,” about Gary Hart (Caddell’s second choice) and generational politics? Or “Norwegian Wood,” about Mondale? Or “The Conversation,” about the center-left policy wonkery that eventually stocked the intellectual larder of Clinton’s ’92 campaign and the Clinton presidency? Or “The C-Span Boys,” Sid’s groundbreaking report on the tight-knit group of conservative Republican grandstanders who, under their leader, the then unknown Newt Gingrich, would go on to take over the House of Representatives?

I can confirm Marty’s claim to have been responsible for hiring Sid in the first place. (The two first met in 1967, when the latter was a student at Brandeis, the former’s alma mater.) But this is something for which Marty deserves credit, not blame. Marty takes a lot of heat, usually well-earned, from the left-of-center blogosphere, but his solid services to liberalism far outweigh his forays into erratic, hot-tempered neoconservatism. The list of center-left journalists whose careers he has boosted—directly or indirectly, actively or passively—is astoundingly long. Dorothy Wickenden, Ryan Lizza, James Wood, Margaret Talbot, David Grann, me—and that’s just a few who are currently at The New Yorker. Then you’ve got Michael Kinsley, Bob Kuttner, Ronald Steel, James Bennet, Barton Gellman, Robert Wright, Jacob Weisberg, David Greenberg, Robert Reich, Spencer Ackerman, Jack Beatty, Margaret Carlson, Andrew Sullivan…

There are dozens more. Not all of Marty’s beneficiaries love him. Some of them can’t stand him; some have been attacked by him, in print or in pixels or in person. All the same, they and their readers have reason to be grateful to him. I certainly feel that way.

Marty’s fulminations shouldn’t necessarily be taken too seriously. As I say, he’s excitable. Anyway, being lambasted by him can be nearly as advantageous a career move as being hired by him.

For example, in his blog item ranting about Sid, he writes: “I do not hold the written rantings of his son Max against him.”

Max Blumenthal, who is indeed a Sidovich, is a diligent reporter who specializes in using old-fashioned journalistic methods, such as picking up the telephone, attending public events, going places to interviewing people, and consulting public records, in order to illuminate the swampy far reaches of the far right. For example, his recent Daily Beast piece on Orly Taitz, the woman behind a lot of the “birther” nonsense and a frequent guest on Fox News and the like, begins this way:

Almost as soon as Orly Taitz answered her cellphone, before I could even ask a single question, the leader of the movement determined to disprove President Obama’s American citizenship breathlessly told me the president was “connected” to 39 bogus Social Security numbers, including one for a deceased person born in 1890. “If Obama is not stopped, we will be in Nazi Germany!” Taitz, who has a thick Russian accent, shrieked. “Forgery is a criminal matter and he committed it. Obama should be in the Big House, not the White House!”

I very much doubt that Marty’s sideswipe will hurt Max’s feelings, and it certainly won’t hurt his book sales. “Republican Gommorah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party,” his jaw-dropping exposé of the rampant sexual hypocrisy of various leading lights of the Christianist right, will be out next month, and it is interesting (to say the least) as well as educational.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.